Deploying Laravel application on Google App Engine flexible environment.

I really liked Google App Engine(GAE) as its simple to deploy the application onto it and GCPs user interface is also less chaotic. I hardly had to make any changes in my application to make it compatible with GAE, except it should be cloud ready.

There was one particular issue which I faced while deployment that I have mentioned at the end.

The Prerequisites :

1. Google Cloud Platform account.
2. Google Cloud SDK.

So let's get started :

• Firstly, we create a new project from the GCP console, Click on Select a project -> New Project

• You need to type in the Project Name(for me its Demo Project) and can keep the Location as default.

• Now we would be creating a SQL instance, Select SQL from the navigation pane.

• Select Create instance.
• Choose a database engine, in my case its MySQL.

• Make sure that the correct project is selected while creating the engine.
• We would be creating a 2nd generation MySQL instance.

• In the next step, specify the Instance ID (demo-instance for me), Root Password, Region (asia-south-1 for me).

• Once the MySQL engine is created, we can select it and create a new database for our application.

• Once the database is created, you can use the import functionality to import your schema(MySQL dump file) into your database (testdb in my case).

• Next, we need to enable the Cloud SQL Admin API for our project, select APIs and Services from the navigation pane, and enable the API.

• We need to add the app.yaml file into our project, it contains the following details:

• You can get the cloud_sql_instance id from the overview tab in the instance details.
• Add the following under scripts in the composer.json

“post-install-cmd”: [
“chmod -R 755 bootstrap\/cache”,
“php artisan cache:clear”
]

• We start with the deployment now, we would be using the Cloud SDK for that. Run all the commands from the project folder.
• We first Login into GCP (Running this command opens a tab on your default browser asking for your account details)as :

gcloud auth login

• Next, we set our default project (You can get the project id on clicking on the project).

gcloud config set {yourprojectid}

• We can deploy the project as,

gcloud app deploy

• It would ask you to specify the region in which you wish to deploy the app.

That’s it, this would deploy your app on GAE.

Issue :

I had specified the Gate rule to implement Authorization in the AuthServiceProvider as :

Since the Providers get called before the connection is made with the database, my deployment failed.

So I had to move the Gate rule to Middleware and call that middleware on the specific routes which needed authorization.

Please get in touch in case of any queries.

Thanks.